


Don't Say A Word

by Kieron_ODuibhir



Series: Cirque de Triomphe [51]
Category: Batman (Comics), Batman - All Media Types, DCU
Genre: Abandoned Warehouses, Abusive Parents, Alliances, Childhood Friends, Cool Hats, Creepy Fluff, Drama, Earth-3, Gen, Gotham Circus - Freeform, Grief/Mourning, Homework, Lollipops, Lullaby Lyrics, Mirror Universe, Origin Story, Psychopathology & Sociopathy, Revenge, being Owlman's 'friend' is a bad idea, creepy child, good parents, grumpy clown day
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-02-29
Updated: 2017-03-31
Packaged: 2018-05-23 22:02:39
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 6,482
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6131559
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kieron_ODuibhir/pseuds/Kieron_ODuibhir
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When Thomas Elliot was eight years old, Thomas Wayne chose to save his mother's life. Bruce...</p><p>Bruce has made other choices.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Don't Say A Word

**Author's Note:**

> In honor of Leap Day, here’s me fulfilling a request so old I have legitimately forgotten who placed it. ^_^; Sorry to whoever you are! Shoutout to me in a review and I’ll give credit where due. You are awesome, I just clearly need to keep notes or something.
> 
> One gag in this first chapter is kinda ripped from _Who Framed Roger Rabbit_. Not to say Jokester is a ‘toon, but I think it would be fair to say he possesses a certain spiritual kinship. Cousins through vaudeville, or something.

A knock sounded upon the door of the disused warehouse the Jokester’s Gotham Circus had recently adopted as their primary base. No answer came. Two knocks. Another silence. The visitor lifted his hand one more time, and rapped out a widely familiar, unmistakable rhythm. **_Tap_** _-tap taptaptap!_

One more silence lingered, almost unbearably, and then the door was wrenched open on a glowering clown in a checkered shirt. “Two bits!” he snapped back, and looked his visitor up and down. “We know you?” he asked, as his suspicious eyes landed back on the man’s bandage-swathed face.

The tall man shook his head. He was wearing a long coat and a brimmed hat, giving him overall a vague resemblance both to the notorious Question and to the Circus’ own Janus. “Mister Jokester,” he greeted. His voice was deep, smooth, posh, and unfamiliar.

“It’s Quinzel,” the fugitive bit out. “J Quinzel. You got a name?”

“You may call me Mockingbird.”

“Or I may not. Guess we’ll see.” Jokester paused a moment in an attitude of contemplation. “Nope,” he announced after the moment had passed. “Don’t think I will. Have a nice day.”

He stepped back and shoved the heavy steel door sharply closed, but Mockingbird was in motion first, and jammed his booted foot in the way.

“Yow!” exclaimed Jokester, catching the door against his shoulder as it bounced open again, wide-eyed, as though _he_ was the one who’d just had a body part slightly crushed. “Use your words, man, sheesh.”

He folded his arms and gave a sniff so casual it almost concealed the slight hitch in the gesture, that might have come from a heavy object being passed from his left hand into his right, as they switched places as ‘hidden’ and ‘visible.’ “Whaddya want, already? I’m warning you, getting your foot in the door with us takes a good bit more than just getting your actual foot caught in an actual door.”

“You hate Owlman,” said the bandaged man, not withdrawing his no-doubt-aching extremity, in case the door closed as soon as he did, but not crowding forward either. “Right?”

The clown drummed his fingernails on grey-painted steel. “Duh.”

“And Bruce Wayne?”

Jokester sighed. “They’re actually the same person, y’know.”

“I wasn’t sure _you_ did.” Mockingbird laid his palm flat on the surface of the door. “I’m here to talk about revenge.”

Jokester sucked in a long, thoughtful breath through his teeth. He tried to search his visitor’s face, but even the eyes were shadowed enough by bandages that all he could read was _very intense mummy._ “Wait here a minute,” he directed, and then very deliberately shut the door in Mockingbird’s face, giving him plenty of time to get his foot out of the way.

The white-faced man had not smiled once through the whole exchange. Any Gothamite who’d paid sufficient attention over the years would know this was probably a bad sign.

* * *

Mockingbird was still waiting after eleven minutes, when the door swung open again, and Jokester wordlessly beckoned him inside. The space was darkened now, except for a single light over a lone wooden chair near what was probably the middle of the room, unless they’d erected a lot of internal subdivisions. On the far side of that stood arrayed, dimly, in an arc that cut the chair off from everything except the exit, the entirety of the known Gotham Circus. Even Basil Karlo, the shapeshifter, last heard of in Bialya foiling an assassination attempt on Queen Zazzala.

“Have a seat,” the Jokester invited, gesturing grandly toward the chair.

“A tad theatrical, don’t you think?” Mockingbird inquired, though he did sit down.

“It’s what we do.”

The big man shrugged, allowing this as a fairly reasonable statement, or at least declining to debate it. “You’re willing to hear my proposal?”

Jokester shrugged. “Yeah, but no promises. I guess you know everybody by reputation—this is the Reformer, though, in case you don’t. Guys, he says we should call him Mockingbird.”

Ivy looked different, wearing jeans and a sky-blue turtleneck rather than a green bodystocking and living vines, but she was even more lovely with her face showing, even dressed in a less flattering color than emerald, and if you were looking for it, unmistakable. She drummed her fingertips on her elbow, and looked down at Mockingbird through hooded eyes. “You’re not going to introduce yourself any more than that?”

“I prefer to maintain…plausible deniability.”

Jokester snorted. “That would be fine if we already had a pretty good idea about you and your motives, but Bandage Man, we don’t know jack.”

Red Hood, also maskless, shifted his stance a hair in a way that managed to convey agreement. Enigma, the only one in his full costume, small mask over his eyes concealing almost nothing because his vigilante identity had been tied conclusively to his real name years ago, leaned forward into the light. The shadow cast by his hat-brim hid his face better than mask or gloom had.

“You know who we are, and we don’t know you. You’re the one who came here asking us to trust you. That’s a two-way street.”

The man called Mockingbird sat still in his surrounded chair for a few seconds, and then reached up to take off his own hat. Silence reigned as he began to unwind the mask of bandages. The face that emerged matched his voice perfectly, cast from the same general mold as Wayne’s, or Harvey’s before his injury—clear, strong lines that spoke of careful breeding and more careful rearing. Glances passed around the encircling Circus, each met by a shake of the head. No, nobody knew him.

He took a moment to gauge their expressions, blue eyes hard to read. “My name is Thomas Elliot,” he announced. “I’m a surgeon.” He took a small breath, as though for strength. “My mother was the first person Bruce Wayne ever killed.”


	2. Hush, Little Baby

_He’s eight years old, and he **begged** Mom and Dad to take him out with them tonight. Tommy thinks they wouldn’t have gotten hurt if he’d kept asking until they let him, but he knows that’s stupid. He’s the second-smartest kid he knows, but no matter how many things Dad says are his fault, he knows he can’t stop car crashes from happening. He can’t make them happen by being afraid of the driver getting home, either. He’s smart, he knows he can’t have done anything. _

_At least they’re letting him sit in the hospital waiting room instead of at home._

Are they going to be alright? _he whispers._

Of course they are, _Bruce shrugs, his feet in those silly buttoned shoes his mother dresses him in swinging idly._ My father’s the best there is. At least, _he grins that sharp little grin of his,_ until **I** grow up and become a surgeon, too.

_Tommy admires Bruce tremendously, so this actually reassures him. Any other boy who bragged so much would shake Tommy’s confidence in his word, but Bruce always seems to be able to make good on his boasts, whether they’re about being able to jump all the way across the gap between the choir loft and the rafters, or about being able to charm their way out of punishment for ruining Mrs. Wayne’s new dress. His dad will save them. Bruce said it, so he can finally start to believe it’s true._

_One thing bothers him, though, even about that. After all, Doctor Thomas only has one pair of hands…_

_Doctor Thomas only has one pair of hands, and Tommy only gets to keep one parent. She screams when she finds out, sooner than anyone wanted to tell her but she insisted, until someone’s failure to lie fast enough gave it away; she screams and gnashes her teeth and shouts at Thomas Wayne that he should have saved Roger, someone else could have treated her, he should have saved_ Roger.

What is Tommy going to do without a father? _she demands._

Do you think he would have been better off without a mother? _Doctor Thomas answers. It’s the only argument he’s offered since she started yelling._

_She doesn’t yell anymore. She doesn’t really say anything else, either._

_They go home. His mom has two full-time nurses and he’s only allowed to see her when she’s not too tired. She’s tired a lot._

_Bruce comes to visit only once, but Tommy doesn’t really blame him for not coming back, because he spent that one visit behind a barricaded door, screaming at Bruce about how he_ promised _._

 _It’s not fair to blame Bruce. He knows that. It’s not even fair to blame Mister-Doctor Thomas-Wayne, who has the same first name as him and always seems to have lollipops hidden somewhere for good children. But Dad is never coming home (which would kind of be a relief if it wasn’t_ never _never, if it wasn’t because he’s **dead** , and Tommy feels horrible for thinking that, just because Dad got mad sometimes) and Mom spends most of the time she’s awake crying about that and the pain, because she just isn’t getting better, and everything is over._

_After Bruce leaves and doesn’t come back, Tommy sulks about the house realizing he might have lost his best friend, too, but he doesn’t really care._

_He starts to wish school would start again, just for something to do, and then it does and he hates it. He never hated it before but he gets sicker of the other kids’ stupid faces every day. Bruce is the only one who’s not awful to be around, and he never mentions anything about the screaming from before. It turns out Bruce broke into the teacher’s desk at the start of September and stole the whole year’s list of homework assignments, so they do them all at once one day, sitting on top of the school furnace, and then go to class every Friday to hand that week’s worksheets in._

_The teacher is a very stupid woman and can’t work out how they’re doing it. Keeps trying to get one of the other kids to admit to telling them the assignments. He and Bruce laugh about it while they infiltrate the Gotham University Library. Most of the books there are too hard for Tommy, still, but not for Bruce, or if they are he never admits it._

_He still has a best friend. The au pair scolds and tall, stern Doctor Thomas lectures Bruce. He tries to lecture Tommy, too, but Tommy puts his chin up and says,_ You’re not my father. _And Doctor Thomas looks like Tommy hit him, and never tries again._

 _Tommy wishes he would. Bruce argues back to his dad a lot, draws him into arguments about the real_ purpose _of education, but Doctor Thomas never stops trying to talk to him no matter how stubborn he gets. (He never gets angry, either. Tommy is soso **so** jealous, even more than before.) Mom is still tired most of the time, but she pays attention to the school situation once the nurses finally decide it’s okay to let her know. She declares that of course the little geniuses shouldn’t let the school system hold them back. By Halloween that same year, he and Bruce are slated to start fifth grade together in January._

Providing, _says Doctor Thomas sternly,_ that you actually attend class. Bruce, I’m looking at you. If you continue your current pattern of behavior, you will be dropped back to third and not given any further chances to accelerate.

(No fear,) _Bruce confides later, while they’re eating their lollies._ (We only have to be _half_ as much trouble as we were before and they’ll be so pleased by the improvement they won’t do anything about the rest of it.)

_Tommy’s neck prickles with admiration and maybe something else, too, as he realizes Bruce planned this all along._

_-_

_After Doctor and Mrs. Wayne die, Tommy can’t get to Wayne Manor fast enough. Literally, he can’t—the au pair won’t let him go until the day after they hear the news, which is two days too late. Worried about ‘intruding.’ Mom would have let him, but she’s taken her medicine and gone to sleep by the time Tommy goes to ask her, and the next day she has a headache and can’t see him. Bruce would have known how to_ make _the au pair do what he wanted. He thinks about the ruined silk dress and the way Martha-lady laughed, and the lollipops up Doctor Thomas’s sleeves, and feels sick._

_When he finally gets to the house, though, he feels even sicker, and almost can’t go inside. What if Bruce screams at him? It’s only fair. Bruce came and got screamed at when Tommy felt screamish._

_Bruce doesn’t look screamish when Tommy gets to see him, though. He doesn’t even look at Mr. Pennyworth when he ushers Tommy into the playroom. Tommy, he looks at, but not like he’s interested at all. That’s okay, too._

_Bruce is sitting on the windowseat—not curled up, like Tommy would have expected, just sitting, with his back against the wall and his knees up in front of him, with the last of the autumn leaves all red behind him, on the other side of the glass. Mr. Pennyworth closes the door, and Tommy tries not to jump at the click. It’s just him and Bruce, now. Well, at least this is better than a locked door, right?_

_His friend turns his head away again and stares out over the grounds._

_“Bruce?”_

_Bruce’s mouth twitches, and not like he thinks Tommy’s funny._

_“I wanted to…” Tommy stops, because he doesn’t know how to finish. Say he’s sorry? Like that helps. Try. Make up for before. Pay Bruce back for_ his _trying. “Visit,” he ends lamely._

_Bruce snorts. “Not in the mood to entertain.”_

_“You don’t have to.”_

_“Good.”_

_They stay like that, Tommy standing and Bruce looking out the window, until Bruce bunches up his shoulders and makes an annoyed sound. “You look ridiculous hovering like that, Elliot,” he sniffs. “Sit down.” He waves imperiously toward the piano bench, and Tommy shuffles over and takes it, his back to the ivory keys. Bruce’s mom was teaching him to play. She wanted to get him a teacher, but he’d only practice if she was the one who taught him._

_Bruce is stubborn. He won’t practice ever again._

_Tommy swallows._

_“Are they making you decide things?” he asks awkwardly, at last._

_Bruce looks at him like he’s a very stupid sort of bug. “Making me?” he repeats, in that tone that says ‘You really think anyone can stop me doing exactly as I please, Elliot?’_

_“I mean about…” Tommy’s voice drops to a whisper. “The funeral.”_

_“Oh,” Bruce says vaguely. “Alfred’s taking care of it. It’s not like it matters; it’s not really them anymore.”_

_Tommy wishes he could have felt that way during Dad’s funeral—but on the other hand, the funeral made it **over** , sort of. It didn’t stop hurting, but the hurt got a little further away once all the horribleness of it was done. If Bruce doesn’t care about the funeral, how is he going to feel like the tearing-away has stopped tearing?_

_He feels extra-sorry for Bruce when he realizes he’s going to have to go through a whole funeral without any parent at all, and it won’t even help him any._

_“It’ll be okay,” he says, and Bruce makes a snort that’s almost a snarl._

_“You think?” he asks, shooting Tommy a glare, and Tommy realizes that even though he’s the one who screamed, when it was him, and Bruce is all balled up tight, acting_ normal, _Bruce is the one who’s really angrier._

_Makes sense. Bruce has someone to be angry at. And he never cries._

_“The man,” Tommy says. “Did they catch him yet?”_

_Bruce’s lips draw back until his gums show red, like the sneers he always used to throw at stupid people like their teacher times one hundred, and Tommy’s neck prickles again but he stands his ground. “No,” Bruce snarls. “They won’t, either. Useless police didn’t find a_ trace _of evidence. All they have is my description. They made me give it five times. Like that will help!”_

_“It could,” Tommy points out, feeling ridiculous as soon as he does because everything he knows about police work he learned watching TV crime shows with Bruce. “Saying it again might make you remember something new.”_

_“I remember it all_ perfectly, _” Bruce spits. There’s actual spit, and Tommy backs up now—not because he’s scared, it’s just—spit. Ew. The grossed-out expression seems to startle Bruce for a second, and then his face twists up worse than ever and he says again, “I remember perfectly. A stupid man with a stupid face and a stupid_ gun _. He was more scared than we were, did you know? He_ stammered, _demanding Mother’s pearls. I guess that’s why Father tried to talk him down—he pitied him. He was always too soft a touch, everyone always says.”_

 _“Bruce…” Tommy says, because it hurts him just to hear something like that about Doctor Thomas this soon; it must hurt even more to say it. Why would he say it? Because he’s angry. He’s really, really angry. Tommy was angry, too, after Dad died, but he tried not to be angry at Dad, because he was dead, even though he’s the one who crashed the car, even though he’d been drinking and he would have come home mad, but…it’s easy to just get angry at_ everything.  _He knows what it's like._

 _“_ Thomas, _” Bruce retorts, and Tommy feels so bad for having the same name as Bruce’s dad he almost cries. “Well, being_ kind _didn’t help, did it? That slime is alive, and they’re dead.”_

_“It…” Tommy hesitates. “It would make them happy that you’re alive, though.”_

_Bruce’s teeth show all across the front of his mouth, and he takes a big step forward to shove Tommy so hard he falls down. He bites his tongue as he goes down, but he doesn’t yell. Mr. Pennyworth might hear._

_“What does it matter what would make them happy?” Bruce shouts, and then he’s crouched down over Tommy, pushing him so he stays down on his back, so he can yell in his face. “What does that matter? They’re dead! They’re not going to feel happy or sad ever again, they’re **dead!**_ ”

_Tommy starts crying. He can’t help it. Bruce looks disgusted, but he doesn’t hit him. “Look at you blubbering,” he says, standing up so he can look way down on Tommy. “It’s not your parents who’re dead.”_

_“Nuh-uh,” Tommy admits, struggling to sit up and bunting at his face with the ends of his sleeves, trying to make the tears stop. “But I know how it feels.” He smiles at Bruce, all sniffly but not mad, because he understands. He screamed at Bruce before; now they’re even._

_Bruce snorts and turns his back. “No you don’t.”_

_“I know half. I know better than anybody else.” He stands up, pretty sure he won’t get punched for it now. “I just—there’s nothing to say that’s not stupid, but, but you’re…going to be okay. Okay? Bruce? Someday, it’ll be okay. I’m not okay yet, but it’s—better than it was right after, and you helped it get better, so…I just want to help. With anything. Okay?”_

_Bruce snorts again. “Okay,” he repeats, in the funny squeaky voice he does when somebody’s especially stupid. “That’s a ridiculous word. Stop using it so much.” He clicks his tongue and turns around. “I guess you do owe me, Elliot.” His eyes are just as blue as the hydrangeas Martha-lady liked to tuck behind his ear, but calmer now, and Tommy offers him another smile, because they’re friends. “Fine,” Bruce tells him. “If you can help, I’ll let you know.”_

_Tommy almost sniggers because only Bruce could make it sound that much like he was doing you a favor by letting you help him, but he doesn’t because that would probably ruin his friend’s mood again._

_Bruce goes back to his window seat after that and broods out over the grounds, and Tommy sits on the piano bench and swings his feet until it’s time to go, but it’s better now. Bruce is his friend. Tommy can help. “Remember,” he says before he goes. “If there’s_ anything _. Call me.”_

_Bruce flaps a hand and doesn’t look at him, but after they’ve left the playroom, Mr. Pennyworth puts a hand on his shoulder. “That was well said, young sir,” he says quietly._

_Tommy shrugs. “I meant it.” He squints up at the man. He’s never thought much about him, except as a source of the best cookies ever, but now he’s the only one taking care of Bruce. Taking care of everything_ for _Bruce. “You’ll tell me?” he asks. “If I can help him?” Bruce isn’t very good at that kind of thing. He’s so good at everything he doesn’t know how to say he can’t do something alone._

_Mr. Pennyworth nods, as he escorts him down the hall toward the front foyer. “Your concern does you credit,” he says._

_“He’s my best friend,” Tommy shrugs again. Mr. Pennyworth hands him his coat. “Thank you.”_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I switched who the psychopath was, and this happened! ^^ Bruce appears to have strolled out of an Edwardian schoolboy novel; I blame Alfred. Note that this Tommy is showing a lot of behaviors conditioned by his father. Who was less _physically_ violent, and for that matter less inclined to abuse in the first place, with a kid who actually reacts to parental disapproval and guilt trips, as child psychopaths generally do not. But not so much less that he stopped or anything. :[
> 
> In the actual Hush arc they seem to have retconned the deaths of Bruce's parents up a few years, as they did with Dick's in 'Year One,' but I am steadfast on the traditional age of eight. It's a good age for these calamities, just old enough to grasp abstracts and at least dimly model other people's points of view, but not old enough to have started the emotional detachment process from primary caretakers.
> 
> Thomas Wayne's steady supply of lollipops in case of children is a headcanon I plan to adhere to until somebody pries it out of my hands with an iron bar. He and Martha are sadly undercharacterized. ^^


	3. Mama's Gonna Buy

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> see endnote for warnings

_Tommy and Mr. Pennyworth stand on opposite sides of Bruce at the funeral, which has about a zillion people at it. The caskets are closed and the man droning through the service annoys even Tommy, but Bruce doesn’t give him a death glare or anything. He doesn’t make any expression at all. Toward the end, though, Tommy sees Bruce’s hands balled up in fists against the front of his legs, shaking. He reaches over and grabs his arm, above the wrist, over the sleeve of Bruce’s stiff black suit. Bruce doesn’t like hugs at the best of times, and he’d never forgive Tommy if he made him look weak in front of all these people when he’s trying so hard. But this much should be okay._

_Bruce comes to visit him six days later. He looks almost the same as ever, but Tommy gives him a hug anyway, and Bruce takes a second longer to shove him away than he used to._

_They get the kind of unhealthy mass-produced snacks that Mr. Pennyworth never lets Bruce touch out of the kitchen cabinet when the au pair turns her back on purpose, and eat them while they watch TV, and then Bruce helps him put his radio back together. “_ That’s _how you do it, Elliot,” he says, in his most lordly manner._

_Tommy takes Bruce up to visit Mom, because he feels like he has to, and they’re very polite to each other, though Mom’s a little blurry and Bruce is a little cold. Tommy suspects he’s thinking of pretty laughing Martha who isn’t at home, and doesn’t try to stay long, though he talks to Mom a little since this might be the only time he sees her awake for a few days. Bruce spends the time being interested in all the medicines lined up on the table, which makes sense since he’s always wanted to be a doctor like his dad._

_Mom’s falling asleep when they leave, and Tommy apologizes. Bruce brushes it off and beats Tommy at Scrabble, though Tommy makes him fight for it. Bruce’s smile when he gets the triple word score on ‘persimmon’ and finally puts Tommy in his dust is the realest happy thing he’s seen in ages. Bruce wanders off to the bathroom while Tommy’s cleaning up, but that’s normal, too. Bruce has probably never picked up after himself in his life. They both smile when Mr. Pennyworth comes with the car and it’s time to say goodbye. Tommy thinks they really will be okay._

_He slips up to Mom’s room again after Bruce leaves. The nurses are still gone, and she’s awake again._

_“Mom?” Tommy says. He knows he shouldn’t bother her so often, but she’s all he’s got left, and now that Bruce—well, he’s lucky, is all._

_She smiles, a little sleepily, and puts her book to one side. “Tommy. Come here.” She waggles her fingers, and he pads over and hoists himself up on the bed, so she can tuck him against her side._

_She smells of sickness and too long in bed, even though the sheets are always clean and fresh, but she also smells of baby powder and lilacs and **Mom,** and he thinks of when he was really little and used to wriggle in between Mom and Dad and fall asleep. He’s not going to cry now, though. Not when Mom’s smiling._

_She squeezes him a little, around the middle. “And how’s my brave boy doing?” she asks._

_“Uh…good,” he tells her. “Bruce is coming to school again next week. He told the Head he’d sue if he didn’t get to start fifth grade next term like she promised, and_ she _said he had to keep coming to school until then if he wanted special treatment. I think he only said yes because Doctor Thomas said the same thing…” He realizes the smile’s gone away. “I’m sorry,” he says. “I didn’t mean to talk about anything sad.”_

_“No, don’t feel bad,” she tells him. “It’s just…I never made up with Thomas. He died before I got around to forgiving him for saving my life. How silly.” She sniffles a little, but her thumb pets gently at his ribs, not quite hard enough to tickle. “Bruce takes after him so much. I’m glad you’re a better friend than I am, Tommy.”_

_He scrunches up, embarrassed. “I just got lonely without him, really.”_

_“My sweet boy,” Mom hums. “Come here.” She tugs a little, and he kicks off his shoes and snuggles in beside her. He guesses he’s supposed to be too big for this, but there’s nobody here to see. “My brilliant little boy. You’re the most precious thing in the world, and don’t you forget it,” Mom whispers._

_“You too,” he mumbles. The house is perfectly climate-controlled, and he has plenty of blankets, but his own bed always feels cold these days. This is perfect. He wants to stay awake so he can spend more time with Mom, but he can already feel himself drifting._

_She strokes his back like he’s still a little kid, and starts to sing. “Hush little baby, don’t say a word…Mommy’s gonna buy you a mockingbird.” He always used to giggle at all the silly things she promised to buy him in this song, but maybe he’s too old or too tired or too sad for that now. He grabs a handful of her nightgown and closes his eyes. “And if that mockingbird won’t sing, Mommy’s gonna buy you a diamond ring.”_

_Breathe in. Lilac and medicine and clean sheets. And Mom._

_“And if that diamond ring turns brass, Mommy’s gonna buy you a looking-glass. And if that looking glass gets broke…”_

_Tommy falls asleep finally warm._

_When he wakes up, Mom is cold._

_He doesn’t even try to wake her up, because he knows, he_ knows _what this means, how cold she is, but it takes him a long time to be willing to move. He should want to run away from her, because she’s just a body now, like Bruce said, it’s not her anymore and death is…but until he gets up, he can lie here, and look at her face, so peaceful. Her color’s wrong already, but she still looks like her. Just sleeping. For the last time. Dad in the coffin didn’t look anything like Dad._

_Finally he slips out from under the covers, and tucks Mom in very carefully even though she’ll never care about drafts again, and goes downstairs to find somebody._

_The nurses are eating breakfast in the kitchen with Alice, the au pair, and he walks right up to them before they notice him._

_“You’re white as a sheet, Tommy,” says Alice._

_“I’m afraid my mother is dead,” he tells them, perfectly composed, and it’s as though it’s only after the three of them recoil in horror that he can finally cry, and he does. Before he knows it he’s on the floor, polished wood grain all dark gold, and he can hear himself wailing but he can’t feel it coming out of his mouth, or the au pair kneeling down beside him trying to calm him down while the nurses run for the stairs._

_He screams for a long time._

_In the end, the police decide the nurses messed up and both of them gave Mom her IV sleeping pills, even though both of them say they didn’t give her_ any _because she was already asleep, and getting the same medicine twice meant she never woke up. It was an accident so they don’t go to jail, but they don’t get to be nurses ever again, which Tommy thinks is more than fair. He doesn’t think he can forgive them, but mostly he tries not to think about them. It’s pretty easy. He has a lot of other things to worry about._

_He thought it was bad, before. When Dad died and Mom stopped getting out of bed and everything changed._

_But now Mom is gone, too, the world really starts to fall apart around him. Tommy doesn’t have anyone like Mister Pennyworth who his parents wrote into their wills should take care of him. Or who would even want to. The au pair goes back to England as soon as the police decide it wasn’t her fault. There’s plenty of money—not_ Bruce’s _kind of money, but enough he doesn’t need to get a job when he grows up unless he wants to, as long as he doesn’t want anything really expensive._

_The lawyer, Mr. Pauhitz, takes care of everything for a little while. He’s the executor. He sets up the funeral, which is nightmarishly almost exactly like Dad’s only Mom isn’t there to hold his hand from her rolling bed, and the hole in the ground once they get out to the cemetery is on the other side of the stone._

_Bruce comes to that. He doesn’t say much, but he lets Tommy hold onto him when he can’t look at the coffin anymore._

_He doesn’t hug back, or anything, but Bruce is bad at that kind of thing._

_Mr. Pauhitz finds a cousin of his father’s living in Pasadena who agrees to take care of him until he’s old enough to get the trust. Tommy doesn’t trust him, but he and his wife aren’t mean or anything, and their sons are four, six, and nine years older than him but they don’t bully him much. Cousin Ron doesn’t drink. Mostly they leave him alone. Tommy returns the favor._

_He’s thirteen when he sees Bruce on the news, winning some kind of high school debate championship. A sidebar story is about the older student who would have had the slot on the team, but was tragically killed in a car accident. So much death, he thinks sadly. Maybe they’re both cursed._

_All he wants is to save people. Another Thomas once saved his mom for a few months, so he didn’t have to lose them both at once, like Bruce did. He wants to do that. He wants to be even better than that. He wants to be a doctor who never fails._

_He’s sixteen when he leaves for college, partly to get away from the cousins in Pasadena who seemed to love each other less with every day they had to be a family around his intrusive presence, so that now the boys never come home, but mostly because he’s in a hurry to get medical school over with. He enrolls in the five-year combined program, works so hard he doesn’t dream at night; or rather his dreams are a continuation of studying, notes and diagrams and the dissected innards of cadavers._

_He’s twenty-one and starting his internship. He’s twenty-three and starting a second one, because no one will take him seriously as a doctor yet anyway, he’s too young, so he might as well keep studying. He’s twenty-seven and knows four kinds of surgery and internal medicine as well as anyone can who hasn’t had a lifetime’s practice. If the car accident happened again today, while Thomas Wayne saved his mother Thomas Elliot could save his father._

_They say that some seventy percent of human behavior is the attempt to control situations that are already past._

_He’s twenty-eight and has his first patient die on the table._

_He’s thirty and spends a year doing nothing but cosmetic reconstructive surgeries. He can make people’s lives better without risking them dying on him._

_He’s thirty-one, and an intern he could love if he’d allow himself the risk of living through another loss slaps some sense into him and sends him back to the hospital where he belongs._

_He’s thirty-four, and on emergency room rotation when Bruce Wayne is rushed to the hospital—not as a patient, but as a ride-along. The patient is an older gentleman called Lucius Fox, who’s the head of something-or-other for Wayne Enterprises and worked for Dr. Wayne before Bruce; something was in his dinner that he shouldn’t have eaten (coconut, according to the very concerned young Mr. Wayne) and he’s in anaphylactic shock._

_Allergic reactions are not one of Doctor Elliot’s specialties, and he’s busy successfully stemming the flow of blood out of a young woman impaled by half a steering column when they arrive, but he gets the scuttlebutt later. Hears almost right away, a little later on, after organ failure cascades and the high-profile patient is lost._

_Is watching from one end of the waiting room when they tell Bruce, and cuts around through the twisting inner hallways of the hospital to intercept the path on which the businessman storms off. Not to interrupt his grief, just to keep an eye on him. They were childhood friends, after all. They’re under the same curse._

_Except, when Thomas looks out the right narrow window and finds him, tucked up beside the tallest tree in the garden outside the hospital chapel…Bruce smiles._

_It’s not the right kind of smile. Bitter, melancholy, hysterical—Thomas has seen a lot of initial grieving reactions, more than he ever wanted, and they take a lot of forms, smiling very much included. But this is wrong._

_All alone, thinking himself unobserved, with one of his oldest mentors newly dead, choking on air before his eyes…Bruce Wayne smiles a slow, pleased, comfortable smile, like a cat with yellow feathers sticking to his whiskers with thick cream._

_It’s so completely_ wrong _._

_And Thomas thinks about the way Bruce looked at all the medicines lined up beside his mother’s bed, and the fifteen minutes he had to himself after that Scrabble game, and his stomach twists into such knots he almost throws up all over the chapel floor._

_He’s looked up to Bruce Wayne his whole life, even if Bruce never did actually go into medicine; he’s always slightly felt that he adopted Bruce’s dream from him after their parents died. He leaned on Bruce in the months after his father’s death, tried to hold him up after Doctor Thomas and Mrs. Martha died too, has never had a closer friend in all the years since. Hasn’t thought of him more than occasionally in years, but—it’s_ Bruce.

_Brilliant Bruce, Bruce who always got his way, no matter what. Bruce who raged and sulked and charmed and plotted to get **exactly what he wanted** , always, and the pieces of some of Thomas’s fondest childhood memories spring apart and reassemble themselves into a new, darker picture._

_No one will believe him._

_But he knows._

* * *

_Three weeks later, sitting at home in his silent apartment, exhausted after his shift but too nervy to sleep, brooding over his suspicions and the impossibility of proving them, Thomas is gazing unseeing in the direction of his television when a breaking news report interrupts the broadcast._

_There’s a fight in progress in Gotham. Some kind of hostage situation, apparently. It’s like something from a movie, even in this age of drama and wonder where the world’s been attacked by aliens more than once: A bald, dark-skinned female ninja is fighting an alligator-man on the piers of a major bridge. A sludge monster is rearing up over a cluster of civilian cars trapped on the bridge, absorbing bullets from a crew of obvious thugs, enough of whom are prominently wearing an image of a black feather that Thomas assumes it’s some kind of gang sign. A short man in a green hat and a tall one in a red helmet are tag-teaming a teenage boy in a red cape, who has a long dagger in each hand._

_And in a clear space in the middle of the four-lane bridge, a man in a mask is fighting a clown._

_He_ shouldn’t _be able to guess anything, from that. Bruce Wayne to him is a distant memory. They haven’t spoken in over a decade. The boy he knew might have been able to throw a punch, but Tommy never saw him do it, and he_ definitely _hadn’t been trained to move like_ that _. And yet._

_And yet the owl-man lands, and jerks his chin scornfully. And._

_And **of course** it’s Bruce. Who else would it be._

_Gotham is his city, after all._

_He still can’t prove anything. He’d be hard-pressed to even_ explain _his conclusions in a way that didn’t make him sound delusional. And yet. And yet, and yet. He has to do **something.**_

_Thomas is a surgeon. Control issues are part of the usual personality profile. But he doubts anyone would be comfortable with not being able to do anything at a time like this._

_Avenging his mother sounds good, but maybe even more than that…if he’d figured Bruce out back then, they could have locked him up, or at least people would have known to watch him. (That kid who’d died, so Bruce could take his or her place on the debate team.) If he’d figured out what he was before taking him into his house and introducing him to his mother, she might still be alive._

_He doesn’t have anyone left to lose, and yet he still feels as though…as though if he doesn't find some way to stop Bruce, he'll lose everything again. Which is stupid, of course, because Bruce probably barely remembers him, and if Thomas doesn't provoke him probably never will.  
_

_But he's not afraid Bruce will come after him, really. That isn't it._

_He's afraid of spending the rest of his life as a boy who couldn't save his parents._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warning: In this chapter a character dies in their sleep while bedsharing with a child, who wakes up to find their parent dead.


End file.
